Which is unfortunate. Because however well it’s written — and I’m a fan of Krakauer’s writing, particularly Into the Wild — the book has a tendentious take on religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Imagine a book that presented itself as a history of Islam and was called Under the Banner of Jihad, with half of its chapters devoted to Mohammed and the early days of the faith and the other half devoted to Osama Bin Laden. And imagine its thesis was that religion tends to make people violent and that Islam does so more than most. Books like that exist, I’m sure — plenty, I imagine. But do you want to read them?

A couple other books I read this summer were just as gripping as Krakauer’s and yet addressed Mormonism in a more nuanced fashion than he manages. And they’re hardly apologetics: One got the author kicked out of the Mormon church and the other is a true-crime tale about the religion’s gravest scandal of the last 30 years. That one’s called Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders. It centers on Mark Hofmann, a world-class forger who, after growing up in the faith, faked several seemingly landmark Mormon documents that, if authentic, complicated the church’s history in uncomfortable ways. As his deceptions — and shady financial dealings — caught up with him, Hoffman took to making bombs, killing two people and wounding himself. Salamander tells the whole sorry story with careful research and not a shred of sensationalism.

But an even more stunning tale is told in No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, by Fawn M. Brodie. While it’s no longer the definitive biography of Mormonism’s founding prophet — that would be Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, by Richard Lyman Bushman — it’s a classic. And Brodie writes beautifully. “Carried along in the migration had come the flotsam of the godly,” she says of the nonconformists who fanned out west from New England in the early nineteenth century. “The body of the prophet lay for a time quite alone,” she writes near the end, describing the scene after Smith’s murder, “until Willard Richards ventured forth to carry it back into the jail and lay it beside the body of his brother.” Her comment in the preface that “Joseph Smith dared to found a religion in the age of printing” remains a key insight for students of the religion. Brodie — whose uncle David O. McKay would become the president of the LDS church, but who had long since ceased believing in the Mormon gospel herself — published the book in 1945. She was excommunicated the following year. If you’re interested in Mormonism — because of Mitt Romney or for any other reason — read her book.

It's not my fault that the most popular girl at the dance is also the coolest and the smartest and the funniest and the sexiest; plus she's got blood under her fingernails and one helluva snarl: ferocious, seductive, ironic and dark.

'Skyfaring' is a love letter to flight, to a profession, and reading it is a balm. Vanhoenacker slips easily between poetic meditation into the nature and history of travel and technical explanations of the mechanisms of the 747, and it is a delight to encounter someone so unabashedly enamored of the romance of his profession.

It delivers a strange, bittersweet literary ending which isn’t so much a punchline as it is the moment when you realize you’ve been paying for your drinks all night with $100 bills instead of $10s but that at the bottom of your plate of peanuts there’s a diamond.

It’s safe to say that Tumblr saved my reading life. By the time I began using police composite sketch software to create images of literary characters suggested by Tumblr users I had really stopped reading fiction. Between sorting short stories every month at Joyland and switching from writing unsold novels to working on film and television scripts, my relationship to fiction had trailed off to a sluggish pulse. When The Composites took off, I started reading what thousands of complete strangers told me to read and, in the process, I rid myself of a lifetime of habits, biases, and poorly formed opinions on what literature should be. I killed my inner pundit.
Answering the hive mind of Tumblr, I was sent rummaging through my books in storage. I searched Project Gutenberg. I skulked the aisles of The Strand bookstore with pen and notebook, hoping to not get caught. While I thought I probably looked thoroughly insane, I’m confident the staff had seen worse. Hell, I even bought a few books.
This accelerated thesis-style surveying of 400 random novels over eight months allowed me to revisit books from my past and to see their forgotten influence on me now. Stephen King may have unknowingly swiped the title Joyland, but I still think Misery is a bitter, hilarious, and brilliant novel. Not before or since has such a popular author figuratively punished his fans with effortless postmodernism -- a nuance I may have missed when I first read it at age 13.
I re-read The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s messy, vital book about the impossibility of living authentically. His consciousness-altering writing merged with The Composites, from the definite article title to the heady brew of ideas about representation and originality. Even the resulting composite image of the protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, felt like a mystery solved. Gaddis had described a face much like his own.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s perfect novel The Master and Margarita was something I boldly lied about having read before and once you lie about having read a book it’s very difficult to undo deceptions you’ve built your life on. Jonathan Lethem’s funny and affecting The Fortress of Solitude was a novel that sat on our shelf for years (it’s one of my wife’s favorite books). Neil Gaiman’sAmerican Gods is the story I now most want to see as a TV show adaptation.
The default of the hive mind is to reiterate the popular. A composite drawn from Gaiman’s novel created waves of nerdgasms throughout Tumblr while something like the composite from The Recognitions brought a smattering of applause from five men in cardigans. I tried to keep the balance of popular and unpopular in phase during my nine months of social reading but what most changed my understanding of literature was being asked to look at staggeringly popular books.
Women who write popular books are given a raw deal out of the critical gates, judged on criteria that similarly popular male authors never face. How much had I unconsciously absorbed that bias? Suzanne Collins’sThe Hunger Games is not a book I would have read without hundreds of requests for me to do so, but I’m glad I did. It is a damn good book. Collins’s writing is economical and elegant and the novel’s allegories about class and entertainment are sharper than literary attempts to explore the same subjects.
Having spent a year speed-reading and skimming 400 books, I think I deserve another few years off. When I do start again, though, I know it will be as a freer, more open reader.
More from A Year in Reading 2012Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

From the gaggle of books I have read over this past year Beautiful Ruins, Gods Without Men, and The News from Spain stand out as especially special.
Jess Walters’s novel Beautiful Ruins is a lovely story in which a handful of likable characters wend their disparate ways across nearly a half of the last century, from an obscure Italian coastal town to an array of locales on the shores of America, to resolve an unlikely but plausible narrative. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor make appearances.
Gods without Men is a sprawling high-powered multi-threaded story that diverges into some rarified and elevated subjects -- parents flailing at the near impossible task of raising a seriously autistic child, a stock trader searching for and believing he has found an algorithmic formula for trading that in its Kabbalistic form is the Holy Grail, recondite anthropologists studying southwestern Native American culture, hippy cults, and more, spark a steady forward fugal motion. Reading this story sometimes feels like a breathtaking roller coaster ride as it shoots from one dissimilar point of view to another. It’s an exciting read with some brainy and amusing digressions.
Andre Gregory’s blurbs on Joan Wickersham’s collection of stories The News from Spain asserted that the stories were sufficiently weighty that they could be read twice in succession -- an unusual notion, methinks. And yet I found that the stories were so engrossing and rich with thoughtful characters that I easily followed Gregory’s suggestion. And was indeed rewarded with another pleasurable read. Not linked stories, but bound by the author’s conceit of having the phrase The News from Spain appearing in each -- without, I must say, an appearance of contrivance or showiness.
I volunteered to participate in this exercise because it required me to focus my attention on my own reading habits -- which I otherwise wouldn’t do, as I am not usually interested in the meta-gesture of thinking about or reading about reading (though I do recommend Andrew Piper’sBook Was There: Reading in Electronic Times).
What did I learn? Looking over what I read in the past 12 months, the list confirmed what I already knew -- that I am a literary omnivore and any litany of books tells more about the reader than individual the books listed. No big surprise there.
More from A Year in Reading 2012Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

Trying to make sense of the books I loved in the last year and why is a bit like trying to divine the logic that guided me into past relationships. The books -- each a kind of lover -- all just...made sense at the time.
I don’t have favorite lovers, just current ones. Right now, I’m cheating on all of you with Helen Oyeyemi's novel Mr. Fox. Like her excellent Boy, Snow, Bird -- another recent paramour of mine -- the magical realism in Mr. Fox pulled me into its grasp one page at a time, seducing me so effectively I didn’t realize I had walked into a heart-shaped trap until it was too late.
My relationship with A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara was so brutal I spent the entire summer in France trying to get my groove back. Reading a galley of Alexander Chee's forthcoming epic The Queen of The Night helped a great deal. But then I returned to New York City in the fall and couldn’t walk down a single sidewalk in the city without meeting someone else who’d also been seduced then wrecked by A Little Life. There should be a recovery group, ALL-Anonymous, for people who, like me, didn’t know that a book could be so gorgeously wrought and exacting at the same time. That book hurt me; I’m not sure if this is a recommendation or confession.
Some lovers sent me running into the arms of old haunts. Reading Eula Biss'sOn Immunity forced me to think about the self in relation to others. If the borders of our bodies are in fact porous, what do we owe one another? I expected a book about disease and instead Bliss’s brilliant meditation urged me to consider morals in a challenging, beautiful way. And so from that lover, only one ghost would do: I got my hands on a copy of Melville House’s James Baldwin: The Last Interview. The conversations the book captures speak to the self’s relationship with racism, America’s most infectious disease, and I just don’t know what to do with the fact that everything Baldwin says feels so hauntingly contemporary -- except know it and honor it.
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.